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ISO Takes Control Of OOXML

Posted by Soulskill on from the down-to-business dept.

mikkl666 writes "Alex Brown, head of the ISO work group responsible for OOXML, has posted a summary of their latest meeting, and he also comments on the resolutions discussed there. The basic message is that ISO now has 'full responsibility for the standard,' and that several workgroups will be established to work on OOXML. An interesting point here is that 'setting up a maintance[sic] procedure for ODF, and then working on cross-standard initiatives' is one of the explicit goals. On a side note, they also reacted to the very emotional discussion on OOXML by posting an open letter: 'We the undersigned participants ... wish to make it clear that we deplore the personal attacks that have been made ... in recent months. We believe standards debate should always be carried out with respect for all parties, even when they strongly disagree.' As Brown correctly points out, 'This content speaks for itself.' We discussed the approval of OOXML earlier this month."

15 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. What do they expect? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After all the backroom dealing that was involved in getting OOXML standardized, a lot of people are going to be bitter.

    1. Re:What do they expect? by Lknight · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's amusing to see that because of the actions of a single software company, money that could have been spent on something like finding cleaner sources of energy or battling rising food prices, will now be spent on trying to support OOXML.

      ODF is a standard, implementable by any third party and independent of the implementor's software. OOXML's inclusion as a 'standard' now also has the effect of influencing ODF's openness via 'cross-standard initiatives'.

      The ISO process was abused, clearly. OOXML does not meet the minimum definition of an open standard and that is enough to show the process was abused.

    2. Re:What do they expect? by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Despite the bevy of rational explanations, with official bodies denying, often with proof, that no 'backroom dealing' occurred, it's still not enough for people to realise that the ISO process may actually be working fine

      Have you actually looked at the OOXML spec? It doesn't matter if "backroom dealing" occurred. If that trainwreck is approved as an ISO standard, then the ISO process is broken. Full stop.

      --
      http://outcampaign.org/
  2. Personal Attacks? by mazarin5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So is evidence of bribery, corruption, and other underhanded tactics considered personal attacks? It looks like they've decided to go ahead and accept it as a de facto standard; I thought they hadn't finished voting yet.

    This open letter assures me though - the $y$tem works.

    --
    Fnord.
    1. Re:Personal Attacks? by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Personal attacks" has increasingly been the whine of people trying to cover up actions and speech that they personally did wrong, when the attacks are on those acts and speech, not the "person" themself. It's a perversion of invoking the "ad hominem" fallacy accusation when all they're really entitled to claim is "don't look at me" (because they don't want to be accountable for their actions).

      --

      --
      make install -not war

    2. Re:Personal Attacks? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This seems sadly true. It's easy for a group that believes in an ethical standard to be misled by people who pretend to it publicly: it's like a spouse with an abusive partner. They hope for the best, and want the partner to improve and hope that they will, but their support of the partner actually prolongs the abusive relationship.

      ISO needs to go to a family shelter, change their address, get a restraining order, and make sure that Microsoft's visitation rights with the children are supervised for safety.

    3. Re:Personal Attacks? by Repossessed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If Microsoft had opened up the specs for the docx and other new file formats for ISO approval, and documented them in an implementable fashion, then I (and I think, pretty much anybody who wants an office suite that can compete with Microsoft), would be thrilled. Hell, I *was* thrilled when I first heard about it.

      Microsoft did not do this though, Microsoft gave us 6000 pages of an unimplementable spec, which refers to information that is not publicly available. There are serious legal questions as to whether the 'patent promise' holds any water as well, meaning that implementing the spec could cause problems for open source products. On top of it all the flagship OOXML product, Microsoft Office, does not currently appear to be following the OOXML spec properly. This is only going to get worse as ISO working committees refine the spec to fix the implementation problems Microsoft put into it.

      The end result of this is that we are left with a ISO spec that has no real world implementation at all. The only thing I can really hope comes out of this is Microsoft gets hit with a fraud charge for claiming office is ISO compliant when is truth it is not.

      --
      Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
    4. Re:Personal Attacks? by Lknight · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Except OOXML already is the standard, or at least the spiritual successor to it. Microsoft Word is how 90% of the world creates their documents. And that's right where we want to be 20, 30 or even 50 years from now.

      Here we have the company responsible for that 90% (if not more!) wanting to open up their file format and make it an ISO standard, giving the wider global community some sort of say in the process, for the first time ever. Not quite. They didn't want to open their file format, but they wanted to make it an ISO standard. They also wanted to give the global community a pat on the head to let them think that they had some sort of say in the process.

      There is absolutely no reason to oppose OOXML's adoption as a standard. It already *IS* the standard and any attempts to block it are just idiots sticking their head in the sand. There is absolutely no reason to oppose ODF's adoption as a standard. It already *IS* the standard and any attempts to block it are just idiots sticking their head in the sand.

      Let me repeat that: the vast majority of human beings on this planet that need to create a document in a word processor do it with some version of Microsoft Word. Period. This is *FACT*. Any move toward putting that file format into an open standard is a good move. You seem to be confused. There is a difference between a de facto standard (in this case due to a monopoly) and a derived standard (usually created and documented from technical input from known experts).

      Complaining that the first version has technical flaws is just as useless. The ISO can address that with revisions. I would agree with you if it wasn't already a 'standard'. Think of other standards that you use which, if they were adopted before they addressed technical flaws, would have disastrous impacts. Want to play with the standard for electrical transmission? How about the standards that even let you use the Internet?

      Some of those "flaws" are directly related to preserving the ability of a word processor to open older documents and render them properly (think un-translatable languages. will archaeologists be able to open a 100-yr old Word document in the future? 500 year old? I hope so, because that will be a regular part of the job...). So our brand new standard has to cater for the current de facto format's ability to be backward compatible with a monopolist's software package?

      What would have been really great is if we had a whole bunch of other standards and incorporated them into a brand new standard! Too bad we didn't think of it before OOXML.

      If you've ever read Joel's article about the file formats, you'd understand that there are some behaviors that simply can't be described other than to say "here is the piece of code that produces that output". No, still don't understand. And by the way, can you show me where Microsoft said 'here is the piece of code that produces that output' for all the binary blobs they're spewing out? Thanks!

      Microsoft didn't care back then - I doubt you would have given a rat's ass in the 80s either under the same circumstances and with the same disk and memory limits. We know a lot more about software development now. Including not to tie ourselves to 80's file formats. Oops. Seems not.

      As far as I'm concerned, anyone who opposes the adoption of OOXML can go piss up a rope. As a developer I'm more than happy to have, for the first time ever, some readily available documentation on the file format and a standards body that will at least try to take care of the standard, whether they ever succeed or not. Well, I'm glad one of us is happy. Actually, no I'm not. If you think the OOXML file format documentation will actually help you, go read it and come back.
    5. Re:Personal Attacks? by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There is a way the governments can recover this...

      Instead of using a title "Open", they list the characteristics they require.

      * Not encumbered by patents in anyway (all involved patents must be released into the public domain immediately)
      * Completely specified (nothing defined in terms of how another program works-- specify the desired behavior)
      * I'm sure there are a few others but these two alone would kill OOXML from being relabeled an apple.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  3. The process spoke for itself by stox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ISO, the best standards money can buy.

    --
    "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
  4. What exactly has changed here? by Lknight · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There were a number of defects in the OOXML 'standard' and there is yet another working group charged with rationalizing the issues who (because of the vagueness of the 'standard') need to get the ECMA people in to 'advise' them if they could change something or not. That does not sound like they're in control.

    One has to wonder who they think they're fooling. Microsoft has no obligation to implement any changes the ISO group may advise, but through the ECMA, the ISO would have no real choice.

    To add further insult to injury, they're setting up yet another group to work on 'cross standard initiatives' - i.e. let's try to make ODF as useless as OOXML as a standard.

    The ISO didn't have control of OOXML from the beginning. If they believe anything they do will give them control, they are sadly mistaken.

  5. Personal attacks... by krazytekn0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    are only uncalled for when there is no clear evidence of personal misconduct.

    --
    Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
  6. You missed the real story with the ISO/IEC action by marbux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Private deal to approve OOXML? More evidence surfaces --- Universal Interoperability Council).

    Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

    [more]

  7. About incompetence by firefly4f4 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Meanwhile some on-looking SC 34 people felt insulted. One neutral XML expert, who I know for a fact took a very close technical look at DIS 29500 asked "what are they saying? that we are incompetent? that we do not have the right to decide for ourselves?".

    No, the general public is not calling them incompetent. Other technical committees are calling them incompetent.

    They're just being polite about it.

  8. I'm Sorry, Is Some ISO Maggot Making M$-Noises? by RailGunSally · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The ISO sold its intrinsic value, in the form of its integrity and credibility, to Microsoft Corporation. Now the utterances of ISO functionaries are of no importance whatsoever, just as the standards maintained by the ISO are of no value at all. We will interpret the actions of M$ and the ISO as the damage that they truly are and simply route around them. The lesson here is that, in the brave new interconnected world, centralized authorities are single points of failure. They are utterly vulnerable to the enemies of freedom, and must be eliminated. We will therefore evolve distributed standards authorities of some fundamentally new nature. Soviet-era centralized control systems are as obsolete as proprietary operating systems. These things will chaotically destabilize and vanish to be replaced by an equilibrium of resilient, distributed algorithms.